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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Through a Pint Glass Darkly..., 10 Jun 2009
(This is a slightly censored and shortened version of a review that I wrote for another site, just in case...)
Through a Pint Glass Darkly...
Ghosts and Lightning is the debut novel of Trevor Byrne, a young Dubliner, that has already seen him praised by the likes of Roddy Doyle - a rare feat. Upon reading the book, it's easy to see why.
Set largely in the poorer suburbs of Dublin, a place I know only too well, the narrator Denny returns home from Wales after hearing of his mother's passing. Suddenly, the realities of Irish life return in all their gritty and morally grey forms with Denny - a moral man - thrown back into the moral dillemma of his drug and drink ravaged, prejudiced, and political-correctness-be-damned Dublin lingo and loyalties. This is not the Dublin you see from a tourist bus - a place of colourful boats and scripted histories and Celtic jewellery going cheap. This isn't where you want your roots to be, it's where you want to leave.
Neither is this novel, in many ways, really about ghosts, though it is about hauntings - the memories of the past, of Denny's mother, of misery in all its forms finding transcendence through humour, American wrestling (!), football, drinking and dancing and mythic flights of the imagination (punctuated, at times, by lightning flashes of violence). Denny inherited his mother's wild irreverence and imagination, and with it he takes us on an honest and, occasionaly, frightening tour of Dublin and the surrounding environs, eventually going North in search of meaning and freedom, to mourn, to touch an ancient magic, to make good with his life.
At points, Byrne uses the occasional chemically-enhanced reverie and inborn wild imagination of Denny to weave his way into a kind of Irish magical realism - a giant horse towering 200ft in the air; Goblins and Sprites; or the evocative imagining of a long-extinct giant Elk - a chieftain in high places, a symbol of an older Ireland. These moments are, for me, gold-dust - imbuing the harsh realities with an older form of magic, inking the page with pagan sentiment. (The Fishfinger of Knowledge is sheer, hilarious genius!) By contrast, the quasi-magical scene with the foal, and the consequences, is both beautiful and profoundly terrifying. Byrne can evoke wonder, fear and revulsion - sometimes all at once.
A sense of loss and yearning - of his mother, of Ireland's collective heritage - reveals itself throughout the novel as Denny gazes at the hard men and hard lives about him, made soft and merry for a time by the shared love of stories and a bit of "banter" (often insulting, yet funny, conversation). A violent act merits a song, a saga, a tale. If in only that, Byrne shows us, we are human - flawed, morally grey, self-destructive, and all too human.
As someone who has been in the places Denny inhabits, and seen the woes and wonders, listened to outrageous stories and laughed and felt bad for laughing, I can say that the book is both authentic in its dialogue, and heart-renderingly touching in its humanity. There were many times I laughed out loud, tears streaming down my cheeks, the dialogue veering from insanely creative insults - a common Dublin/Irish artform! - to poetic description. Indeed, Byrne has turned cursing into a poetic form all his own. If you're a prude, trust me, this is authentic. If you open to it, you may find yourself lost in the poetry of language both profane and sacred.
In the beginning I kind of disliked Denny and some of his friends, then, as the tale moved forward, I realised I shared his predicament - the morally grey life of the places Denny inhabits, the sudden emergence of Ireland into multi-culturalism, the frequent hypocrisy of "Cead Mile Failte" (our so-called welcoming attitude to foreigners), all this bubbles up in the fast-talking, hard-hitting, dark and humorous dialogue of the characters. As the tale unfolds, Denny quickly emerges a good man at times compromised by his friends, family loyalties, the poverty of his birth and the hypocrisies of his country. In the end, he and his friends are looking for love and meaning in a hard place, a place only friends and family can survive.
This is Dublin life, but not the kind you may know or have heard about. I dare say, there are a lot who live in Dublin that don't know this kind of scene. Byrne shows us it all - through a pint glass darkly (pulled by a foreigner!) - yet also gives us hope that laughter and love and friendship beyond breaking can keep back the "Slaughters" of this world, the cold and cruel capitalism, and the hypocrisy of our own immigrant past and modern prejudices. As we sit over that pint o the blackstuff in The Foggy Dew or some other pub, seeing the darkness around us captured in our Guinness, for Byrne and Denny the way we tell stories is the white froth of it all - clean and light and pure.
In short, Ghosts and Lightning is brilliant, beautiful, comic, grotesque, and frightening - a tale told by a half-demented Seanachai, a warrior-poet of old who can metre and rhyme his "f-words" as well as his "c-words". It was simply a strange and wondrous joy to read and see evoked in ways poetic, tragic, yet filled with hope, the harsh realities where I, like Denny, live. This "buke" (not book!) marks Byrne an original, authentic, and powerful new voice in literature to watch and wait for. Highly recommended.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Just a great fun read, superbly written!, 11 Jun 2009
There can be no doubt that there is a new Ireland: built on grand ambition that may have strayed too far from its roots, and dizzy with success, may now face an Icarus-like end. The day to day reality of this period in Irish history is captured here in print, in a magical story full of characters trying to live through the many changes wrought in the place they live - Dublin (though the story at times takes us further afield).
Denny leads us through some very real parts of the city and beyond, in his own friendly and conscious style, while trying to cope with returning to Dublin and the personalities and antics of his (sometimes) reprobate friends, face up to the possibility of there being a ghost residing in his family home, traverse much mishap and adventure, while all the while trying to make sense of the death of the Mother he loves.
It's a light and rewarding read, with surprising depth. As Roddy Doyle has already commented, the story is a very human one; we're bound up with all manner of frailty, and Byrne understands this, dropping the book's characters at our door and leaving us to try to understand, perhaps judge and/or reject, or possibly, empathise with theirs.
As noted in other reviews, there isn't necessarily a steady plot: our lives are often plotless. What we have here is an assortment of events and adventures, held together by Denny's own pursuit of closeness and friendship, love and ultimately, understanding.
This is a brilliant and weighty debut novel from a new and very talented author. It's just a great fun read, superbly written - the dialogue may be tricky for those not used to the accent, but well worth any effort: it's authentic - with something very real and moving and important at its heart - people.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Home is where the trouble is, 4 Jun 2009
Denny Cullen, 21st-century Dubliner at university in Wales, thinks he's left home, but home isn't finished with him yet. Called back for his mother's funeral, he soon seems to be back in the groove, with relatives and friends who are going nowhere fast and doing nothing much (though, this being Dublin, they do it with considerable wit and inventiveness).
His sister Paula senses a ghost in the house she and Denny are allowing to go to rack and ruin; it might be her alcohol-fuelled imagination but then again it might be composed of memories of their dead mother, their absent father, the brothers from whom they are estranged and much other baggage. Before Denny can move on, he needs to decide which bits of his past he wants to leave behind, and which he needs to take with him. Though this is very much a novel of a young man in 21st-century Dublin, he is also a man with a sense of a long historical and mythological past (and his surname is no accident).
One reason this novel lives so vividly for the reader is the liveliness and realism of its voices. Denny's friends and family constantly come alive off the page: the insanely brave Paula, Uncle Victor the long-term book-borrower, gentle Pajo the emaciated recovering drug-addict with Buddhist tendencies ("he's mad into this kind o thing; life after death, ghosts, yetis, any and all religions. Basically anything there's f-all proof for, Pajo'll believe it.")
Both fulcrum and observer, Denny himself is a joy of a voice. He is sardonically honest about himself:
Probably why I can't get a job, some witch's hex. Well, that or the fact I never filled out them forms at the FAS office
but also endlessly imaginative, as when he describes his friend Maggit having second thoughts about something he's stolen:
And wha about the kid who owned it? Is he not gonna miss it?
Maggit thinks about this. He looks into the bag again, like he might o robbed the answer as well by accident.
or when, travelling west, he finds himself overwhelmed by a sense of history:
... Dungloe, Annagary, Glencolumbkille. Never even heard o those places before, never mind been to them, and yet I dunno why, it all seems dead familiar. Mad that, isn't it? This feelin I get that nothing is new, not really.
There are a lot of very funny scenes in this novel - the car being constantly turned upside down, the funeral dominated by a priestly speech impediment. The variation of pace is remarkable too, from frenetic to leisurely and back, but above all the register of language, which accommodates colloquial and lyrical effortlessly. It's a terrifically assured and likeable debut.
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